


Readjusting

by Project0506



Series: Soft Wars [126]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Gen Fic, Introspection, Star Wars AU - Soft Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:49:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27917041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: Bacara knows some things for true that may not be any more.  He learns, he adjusts.
Series: Soft Wars [126]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683775
Comments: 26
Kudos: 242





	Readjusting

**Author's Note:**

> Still not over that tag. I probably won't be over that tag for a while, just a warning.

“I’m going to say this the nicest way I know how,” 17 starts, and then he stops entirely. Struggle paints creases and crevices in the corners of his face.

This room was a storage closet once, Bacara is sure. He thinks he remembers it, or one very like it. Durasteel shelves stretched from ice-cold floors to just-the-same ceilings, an array of supplies and spares hovering along the expanse. Death Watch boys would hide contraband here. Sweets, holos. Bacta. Bacara always somehow carefully managed to miss this door, his cycle to lead inspections. This door, maybe, or at least one like it.

The shelves are gone, mostly, but for one wall of them.

The Marine is fresh from a humbling, reorienting revelation in the Core, at the hand of a _ tat'ka _1 he’d been prepared to take apart with his own two. Even if he wasn’t, he thinks he could still divine the marks of revolution simmering.

They don’t hide their contraband anymore.

Here in the heart of Kamino, warm-toned cabinets ring a room and slouch up the walls. One shelf defiantly cradles splays of brightly colored bits of no use but to catch the eye. Another, a huddle of books wrapped in a humi-control field. This low couch used to be a bunk. That small table used to be a console. Bacara sits on the low couch and he turns a book over-and-over-and over between his ungloved hands, the course hide cover and fine linen pages far too much a distraction to read.

17 sighs explosive resignation. “Kriff off,” he grunts and drops heavily opposite. “Pass me a drink.” Irritation glares out of his eyes. “Since I now suddenly have days of unscheduled, _unwanted_ free time.”

“I apologize,” Bacara tries. He gets a sniff that says it isn’t accepted. He understands. He regrets the necessity, but timelines haven’t left him a lot of options. He nudges the small table across.

Compressed gas hisses from vents at the base. The table slides across the floor on a cushion of air so smooth that there’s barely a ripple across the flight of thumb-high glasses. 17 grunts something that could charitably be thanks and takes a glass without debate.

They’re a splash of colors, from orange to amber, from crimson to cacao. Beers, the darker of them. Bacara isn’t fully sure of the lighter ones and doesn’t trust them much; they glitter dangerous and while he has the day, tomorrow starts early.

17 downs a copper, transpariplast glass chilled frosted and top frothing companionably. A moment, and he twitches an aborted cringe. “That one,” he bites, “isn’t worth the haul.”

“I’m not taking any of them,” Bacara tries. 17 snorts, but doesn’t call him on his presumptive lie. They pretend this table isn’t spread with samples, and that Bacara’s Armorer won’t be subtly interested in which of them he preferred. 17 chooses another at random. Bacara takes his second, a dark, hoping for another chocolate. The first sip of sweet, starchy tuber flavor he gets is unexpected, but not unpleasant. 17 takes another.

It’s not quite companionable and yet somehow the quiet never makes that step over into uncomfortable. Bacara doesn’t know what 17 searches for in Bacara’s profile; whether or not he finds it, what he does see isn’t swirling more strife into the heated circling air. That’s enough for Bacara.

Not for 17.

“Kid,” he says and the word is so entirely unexpected it takes so very long for Bacara to grasp he means _him_.

Bacara’s hand fumbles. 17 snags the book out of the air before the delicate spine can crack against the floor. Effortless. A breath and he is across the room, and Bacara isn’t sure when his slouch became a slide. He catches the book ring and middle fingers along the spine joints. The drink between his index and thumb barely tremors.

Control, perfect and complete. This is the ideal that Bacara has spent every day of his life being honed towards, these First Run too much like Prime for anyone’s comfort.

“Kid,” 17 repeats. He dunks the book back in its anti-humi field. He downs his drink. He has the entirety of Bacara’s attention. “I’m going to do us both a favor and ask you to walk me through what’s brewing in your bucket right now. I’m going to do us both a favor and bench some of the assumptions I could make, because we’re both professionals.”

“I don’t understand.”

It’s a lie. He does. He knows this game well, the calling to account for every decision. It’s not attention-trooper-explain but Bacara’s hands fold together anyway. His back straightens anyway. 17 doesn’t miss it.

He wouldn’t. He trains now, mostly. Not a Trainer, but some things transfer easy, it seems.

Alpha-17 eyes him and doesn’t like what he sees. He grumbles something Standard and lilting and far too fast for Bacara to even pick out syllables. “This’ll be a karking show,” the Alpha mutters. Another drink, one like pre-dawn red. “Stand down kid, for sith’s sake,” he groans.

Kid, again. It punctures the air like a slug. It’s enough, just enough, for Bacara to press instinct back behind reality. Easy, easy, patiently redirecting each thought through channels of context until memories are where they belong until there is only an Alpha Commander and a Marshall Commander and words said and meant, and not construed.

Bacara allows himself to consider the array of alcohols for only a brief moment. He nudges the table away. 17 nods and accepts the limits silently established.

“This is the point where I’d let this go.” Hands free of drink, 17’s fingers search for something else. What they find is a half-palm-long delicate twist of a thing from the lurking baubles, demure silver and unremarkable but for the way the ends of artful curls catch vicious in the low light. A weapon that only shows its barbs in flashes. “I’d say we each go our ways, regroup when we’re both less…” he considers. “… invested. But.”

“But,” Bacara agrees. He is here for four days, and three of them will have little time to breathe, on his schedule. It is today or not.

“So I’ll leave it to you.” The little thing flicks coy through 17’s fingers like silvie minnows through ponds on some world Bacara can hardly remember. Not once do the edges catch on soft web between fingers. “How do we do this.”

“I would prefer,” Bacara picks carefully, “if you would say what it was I’ve done wrong, and how you would like me to correct it.”

“The problem is that everything is technically, already by-the-manual correct.”

It isn’t the compliment it could be, and shouldn’t be the relief it is. But with that Bacara is on familiar ground: it is not his command or his tactics under question. His misstep is some unspoken custom or connection among the brothers.

Bacara has been fouling those since the first attempt he made to Speak. It is galling that he still flounders, but it isn’t anything new.

Alpha 17 sighs. He sinks deep into his end of the couch and presses his back against its makeshift former-rifle-rack of an arm. How curious that even here, tate develop the same habits the Marines have: repurpose everything.

17 tucks a heel up on the seat, drapes an elbow over his knee and rests his hands loose against the soft inside of opposite arms. Unprofessional. Deliberately so.

“Why won’t you trust Rancor to do their jobs.” 17 clicks his teeth in reproof, but at himself. “Why,” he corrects, “do you not trust _me_ to do my job.”

Most of the Advance Tactics courses are shut down for the next three days. Five, if Bacara is being honest: three for him to run simulations, all of today for set-up to his exacting specifications, and another after to return them to general use. Bacara needs to identify anywhere from a company to a battalion’s worth of troopers, maybe even more, to join the fleet of the Galactic Marines.

He doesn’t want to.

“I have laid out very specific standards for Marines.”

17 hums. “Specific. Exacting, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“So much so that you are the only one who could train to that level.”

Bacara sees the trap before he blunders into it. He stays silent. 17 tips his head, acknowledging, and lets him piece together his thoughts.

“Marines,” Bacara begins after many idle spins of the bauble through 17’s hands. “Have to be. Different.”

“From Regs?”

17 chuckles at Bacara’s confusion and waves it away. “Inside joke, sorry. Go on.”

“Marines have to endure.”

“And you don’t believe the staff here train for that.”

“It’s different. What I need is beyond Standard.”

It roils deep in his gut, the thought of taking _any_ of these tat’kate, marching in neat columns in their soft maroon cadet uniforms, back across that line. He tastes bile in his mouth at the thought of how many of them will only make that trip in one direction.

Not now, not when Kote has promised to change everything.

He can’t.

“Alright. I’m going to fire a couple rounds through your reasoning. First: three days.” It’s more than a fair point, and one Bacara already knew. “That’s not ‘training’. At best that’s an eval.”

At best. It isn’t enough time for that, really. It isn’t nearly enough time to correct, not enough to build skill or teach technique.

“And if this _is_ an eval, you know who’d know a trooper’s full breadth of abilities? I’ll give you a hint: it isn’t brass who’ll spend up to three days watching him.”

Rancor has been stationed on Kamino for years. 17 has been training cadets for almost as long as Bacara has been alive. 17 is right: they would be better at judging a cadet’s merit. If they were looking for the same things Bacara was.

“And second.” 17 leans into his slouch, non-threatening to offset the blow he’s gearing to land. “You’re buying into your own propaganda, Marine.” He tips his head, the barest taunt. “Just a smidge.”

Cold certainty straightens Bacara in his seat, and pointed irritation sharpens his syllables. “I am not.”

“You don’t want to,” 17 corrects. “And it isn’t your damn fault, honestly. When you hear the same thing repeated over and over, the edges of it tends to.” He flicks the bauble. “Catch.”

“Explain.”

“You were trained differently. Different methods, supposedly for specific results,” 17 says and they’ve had words on the way Bacara was trained before. Not, he remembers, ever any on the way he trains his troops, just how he was. It isn’t a conversation that has ever managed to move anywhere constructive. Bacara rumbles a hum and 17 takes the warning: they will not agree on this, and they must accept that and move past. “You’ve been told _about_ how the others are trained. Constantly held up in comparison. To prove somehow that the methods used with you were valid, it was necessary to denigrate any other way. The _standard_ training, you were taught, is inherently inferior. And by extension, the standard vod is trained to be inherently inferior.”

They aren’t pushed like he was, to the edge of breaking and held there until enduring wasn’t even an option: it was all that was left. That much he knows as fact.

They aren’t intended to be valuable, Bacara has been told, not like he was. They were meant to be used up and used out and replaced.

_Disposable_.

There was a room, this one or one like it, where once bottles of bleach on the lowermost shelves hid years and thousands of credits of stolen medical supplies worth more than the boys who’d snuck in to use them.

Bacara clenches fists on his knees and hopes.

“You’re saying that isn’t true anymore.”

“Technically, by-the-manual, it’s still true.” 17 eyes glitter knowing. He’s leaned back against a couch sprawled brazenly across a storage room hidden by quirk and chance between the not-quite-overlapping stares of sec-cams.

How much of Tipoca have the Trainers relegated to clones? How much control do they not realize they’ve surrendered?

“Trainers shill their karking ‘benchmarks’,” 17 rumbles, “and the snakes fuss about doling out their ‘product’. That’s the same. But when the call comes, those are _our_ little brothers we’re putting on those ships, Marine. And you insult us when you think _we’re_ willing to send them out just armed enough to die.”

The cool air Bacara drags into his lungs is more drugging than any one of the rainbow of liquors tate have brewed in secret. Trust us, 17 says, and it’s not something Bacara has been able to do, with only a bare handful of exceptions. He nods and it feels nearly droidic, perfunctory.

17 taps the bauble against Bacara’s brow in benediction. “How this works,” 17 drawls and the aggravation he’d carried at the beginning is only trace and teasing now, “is you show up and you tell us who you need. And _we_ tell you where to find them.”

“I need survivors.”

“Convenient. I got a couple of those to start you off. They’re rough,” 17 warns and Bacara couldn’t be persuaded to care any less. “Good. Get your _ osik _2 off my range and I might be convinced to make an introduction in the morning.”

“If it’s already set up, I’d like to run your cadets through.”

“This sound like a negotiation, Marine?” 17 snorts. “And they’re not cadets. Blooded and painted, every one of them.

Bacara hadn’t even thought to hope for veteran troopers. He hadn’t thought to hope for many things at all. “It’s Bacara,” he offers. 17’s glance is pure judgment.

“Bacara,” he sniffs. “I remember. Done anything about the karked knee yet.”

Bacara very deliberately doesn’t wince. The judgment deepens. “Not yet,” he offers, an old, practiced refrain. Keller’s disapproval sits heavier than 17’s and he doesn’t have the time. Not yet. “After.”

17 makes a noise of… something Bacara can’t place. Amusement, annoyance maybe. Some combination. “Swear to karking Prime, every one of you brats have duracrete under your buckets.” He swings the little table of drinks back around and this time Bacara takes one at random. Citrus bursts light and playful on his tongue.

“After,” 17 threatens with a smile that says he will enforce it. It isn’t the drink that warms Bacara’s belly. “And get your osik off my range.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. (Concordian Mando'a, derived) Little Brother. Back  
> 2\. Shit. Back  
> 


End file.
